Friday, 15 July 2016

Updated SMTube on X1000

Today I wanted to take a look at the recently updated SMTube 16.6.0 for AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition on the AmigaOne X1000.

SMTube is a program for playing back YouTube videos via a simple search GUI, without all the pesky ads and annoying pop ups you get on the YouTube website itself. Ironic that YouTube Red charges a monthly fee to remove the ads, when this program does it for free...

Since the last time I looked at this program on this blog, YouTube has updated their website multiple times, most likely to ensure it breaks this program so it no longer worked under AmigaOS4 or other platforms SMTube is available on.

However, the good news is that this latest version of SMTube solves the problems and now can work again with YouTube! Zzd10h handled the work on porting this to AmigaOS 4.1 - thanks mate!

Firing up my X1000 I felt the need to change my backdrop again as it has been a while since I did it. I hope you like it, I certainly do! As always click/tap on the photos to see the larger version.

SMTube is available on OS4Depot here. Please note that SMTube is a QT program and as such requires QT4.7 to be installed in order for it to work.

Also you will need to download the latest version of MPlayer and ffmpeg, also available on OS4Depot. I already have MPlayer installed previously so I don't need to do this here.

Here is the downloaded and extracted ffmpeg archive, ready to extract to the SYS:Utilities drawer:

Update 16/7/2016: I missed a step that the ffmpeg and ffplay needed to be unpacked first. I have updated the instructions below to reflect this - thanks to MickJT for pointing this out. Sorry for that!

Note that the Altivec drawer has the ffplay and ffmpeg programs needed for the X1000 (since it supports Altivec), but they are compressed with xdelta3 and need to be unpacked before you can use it:

To do this, from the Shell go to the ffmpeg drawer and then run "Unpack" and the ffmpeg and ffplay programs will be expanded into their respective altivec and generic drawers, ready for use:

I then Ran the ffmpeg program once from the Shell, to be sure that it worked, and that APPDIR:ffmpeg setting in SMTube can find it.

Having done this, I next moved onto SMTube. I renamed my old SMTube drawer to SMTube.old and extracted the new version - here is the drawer after extraction:

Inside the Amiga drawer is the playvideo.rexx file that we used to need to modify with our player and ffmpeg settings in older versions.

However in this new version it has changed, but the AmigaOS4_readme.txt documentation in the SMTube archive unfortunately has not - please ignore this documentation as it is no longer accurate.

On inspection of the rexx file It clearly now stores it's settings in ENVARC:SMTube.ini instead.

This file is only created on the initial launch of SMTube, so lets do that first:

Here is the SMTube About... showing the new 2016 version which is 16.6.0:

If I search for Warp3D nova videos (I couldn't resist), I can see the interface is still very similar to the old version which is great:

If I then try to run a video at this point, I get an error prompt like below:

If I answer Yes then it updates the scripts in SMTube to be compatible to the latest YouTube requirements to play videos - all done:

I then close SMTube so that the ENVARC:SMTube.ini file has been created. I then edit it to modify it's settings for MPlayer - this is the file before I changed it:

Some examples are included in the file for MPlayer based on the setup on your X1000 - if you have a Radeon HD video card with overlay support or not (ie. Radeon HD 6xxx or 7xxx series for overlay support with the Radeon HD v2 drivers purchased from AMIStore).

Also it depends on if you are running the SDL-Player or MUI-MPlayer (Overlay / Non-Overlay) or LiveForIt Player! Would love one MPlayer version that supported everything!

In my case I have the overlay compatible card with Radeon HD v2 installed and MUI-MPlayer Overlay, so I modify the file with the MPlayer options from the example. I also modify the log output window to be at the bottom right of the screen (as I have a 1080p display) by changing the CONSOLE dimensions option.

Here is the resulting SMTube.ini file after my changes:

If I run SMTube again and select the same Warp3D Nova video from the search results as before, the video now plays perfectly!

Close up of the video playing on the X1000, using SMTube with Player overlay support at 360p.

Why only 360p? Well, because my ADSL internet here in Australia really sucks. It struggles to stream 720p well, so this setting is safest (and also the default for SMTube).

Next I tried out a much longer video which works really well too - no glitches or drop outs:

I relaxed and enjoyed some time watching and listening to some great music on my x1000 using SMTube:

In addition to streaming YouTube videos, SMTube also provides the options to download the video to your X1000 too. If you right click on a search result video, you get the options:

You can copy the link to a web browser, copy the link to a clipboard, stream the video (open with playvideo.rexx) and also download the video (open with downloadvideo.rexx) or just play the audio.

If I download the video (Open with downloadvideo.rexx) I am asked where I want to save the video:

It then started the download:

When completed it automatically opens the destination drawer and highlights the downloaded file, ready to view - very convenient!

Here is the resulting downloaded video being played back directly from the X1000:

Definitely glad to see SMTube working well again and definitely worth the small work to get it running well. Running this program on AmigaOS 4.1 for the X1000 is fantastic and recommended.

3 comments:

Hello Epsilon.I have X1000 with Radeon HD 7900 series and i have installed LiveForIt-Mplayer optimized for RadeonHD as it does not have overlay support, (and support G4 and PA6T withAltiVec) and i can play very good videos in 1080p with smtube.